The poorest county in America isn't in Appalachia or the
Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers
and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000 the Republican
candidate for president, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority of
greater than 75 percent.(1)

This puzzled me when I first read about it, as it
puzzles many of the people I know. For us it is the Democrats that are
the party of workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized.
Figuring this out, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of
adulthood. When I told a friend of mine about that impoverished High
Plains county so enamored of President Bush, she was perplexed. "How
can anyone who has ever worked for someone else vote Republican?" she
asked. How could so many people get it so wrong?

Her question is apt; it is, in many ways, the preeminent
question of our times. People getting their fundamental interests
wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of
derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on
which all else rests. This derangement has put the Republicans in
charge of all three branches of government; it has elected presidents,
senators, governors; it shifts the Democrats to the right and then
impeaches Bill Clinton just for fun.

If you earn more than $300,000 a year, you owe a great
deal to this derangement. Raise a glass sometime to those indigent
High Plains Republicans as you contemplate your good fortune: It is
thanks to their self-denying votes that you are no longer burdened by
the estate tax, or troublesome labor unions, or meddlesome banking
regulators. Thanks to the allegiance of these sons and daughters of
toil you have escaped what your affluent forebears used to call
"confiscatory" income-tax levels. It is thanks to them that you were
able to buy two Rolexes this year instead of one and take delivery on
that limited-edition Segway with the gold trim.

Or perhaps you are one of those many, many millions of
average-income Americans who see nothing deranged about this at all.
For you this picture of hard-times conservatism makes perfect sense,
and it is the opposite phenomenon - working-class people who insist on
voting for liberals - that strikes you as an indecipherable
puzzlement. Maybe you see it the way the bumper sticker I spotted at a
Kansas City gun show puts it: A WORKING PERSON THAT SUPPORTS DEMOCRATS
IS LIKE A CHICKEN THAT SUPPORTS COL. SANDERS!

Maybe you've seen it that way for so long that it's hard
for you to remember why blue-collar people were ever Democrats in the
first place. Maybe you stood up for America way back in 1968, sick and
tired of those rich kids in beads bad-mouthing the country or maybe
Ronald Reagan brought you over, the way he talked about that sunshiny,
Glenn Miller America that you remembered from the time before the
world went to hell. Or maybe Bill Clinton made a Republican out of
you, with his obvious contempt for non-Ivy Americans, the ones he had
the nerve to order into combat even though he himself took the
coward's way out when his turn came.

Nearly everyone has a conversion story of this kind that
they can tell: how their dad had been a union steelworker and a
stalwart Democrat, but how all their brothers and sisters started
voting Republican; or how their cousin gave up on Methodism and
started going to the Pentecostal church out on the edge of town; or
how they themselves just got so sick of being scolded for eating meat
or for wearing clothes emblazoned with the State U's Indian mascot
that one day Fox News started to seem "fair and balanced" to them
after all.

Welcome to the Great Backlash. a style of conservatism
that is anything but complacent. Whereas earlier forms of conservatism
emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with
explosive social issues - summoning public outrage over everything
from busing to un-Christian art - which it then marries to probusiness
economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic
ends. And it is these economic achievements - not the forgettable
skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars - that are the movement's
greatest monuments. The backlash is what has made possible the
international free-market consensus of recent years, with all the
privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization that are its
components. Backlash ensures that Republicans will continue to be
returned to office even when their free-market miracles fail and their
libertarian schemes don't deliver and their "New Economy" collapses.
It makes possible the policy pushers' fantasies of "globalization" and
a free-trade empire that are foisted upon the rest of the world with
such self-assurance. Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by
dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the
lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A.

The Great Backlash has made the laissez-faire revival
possible, but this does not mean that it speaks to us in the manner of
the capitalists of old, invoking the divine right of money or
demanding that the lowly learn their place in the great chain of
being. On the contrary: The backlash imagines itself as a foe of the
elite, as the voice of the unfairly persecuted, as a righteous protest
of the people on history's receiving end. That its champions today
control all three branches of government matters not a whit. That its
greatest beneficiaries are the wealthiest people on the planet does
not give it pause.

In fact, backlash leaders systematically downplay the
politics of economics. The movement's basic premise is that culture
outweighs economics as a matter of public concern - that Values Matter
Most, as one backlash book title has it. On those grounds it rallies
citizens who would once have been reliable partisans of the New Deal
to the standard of conservatism. Old-fashioned values may count when
conservatives appear on the stump, but once conservatives are in
office the only old-fashioned situation they care to revive is the
regimen of low wages and lax regulations. Over the last three decades
they have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on
corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country's
return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution. Thus
the primary contradiction of the backlash: It is a working-class
movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class
people.

The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they
walk corporate. Values may "matter most" to voters, but they always
take a back seat to the needs of money once the elections are won.
This is a basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent
across its decades-long history. Abortion is never halted. Affirmative
action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to
clean up its act. Even the greatest culture-warrior of them all,
Ronald Reagan, was a notorious cop-out once it came time to deliver.

One might expect this reality to vex the movement's true
believers. Their grandstanding leaders never produce, their fury
mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every two years to
return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a
twentieth try. The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off.
Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote
to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to
screw those politically correct college professors; receive
electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs;
receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to
meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social
Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism;
receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever
before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power
and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.

Backlash theorists imagine countless conspiracies in
which the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected - the liberal media,
the atheistic scientists, the obnoxious eastern elite - pull the
strings and make the puppets dance. And yet the backlash itself has
been a political trap so devastating to the interests of Middle
America that even the most diabolical of string-pullers would have had
trouble dreaming it up. Here, after all, is a rebellion against "the
establishment" that has wound up abolishing the tax on inherited
estates. Here is a movement whose response to the power structure is
to make the rich even richer; whose answer to the undeniable
degradation of working-class life is to lash out angrily at labor
unions and liberal workplace-safety programs; whose solution to the
rise of ignorance in America is to pull the rug out from under public
education.

Like a French Revolution in reverse - one in which the
sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power to the
aristocracy - the backlash pushes the spectrum of the acceptable to
the right, to the right, further to the right. It may never bring
prayer back to the schools, but it has rescued all manner of
right-wing economic nostrums from history's dustbin. Having rolled
back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty)
and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports,
banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the
accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Wilson's
estate tax, Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust measures). With a little
more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth
century.

In the backlash imagination, America is in a state of
quasi-civil war pitting the unpretentious millions of authentic
Americans against the bookish, deracinated, all-powerful liberals who
run the country but are contemptuous of the tastes and beliefs of the
people who inhabit it. When the chairman of the Republican National
Committee in 1992 announced to a national TV audience that "We are
America" and "those other people are not," he was merely giving new
and more blunt expression to a decades-old formula. Newt Gingrich's
famous description of Democrats as "the enemy of normal Americans" was
just one more winning iteration of this well-worn theme.

The current installment of this fantasy is the story of
"the two Americas," the symbolic division of the country that, after
the presidential election of 2000, captivated not only backlashers but
a sizable chunk of the pundit class. The idea found its inspiration in
the map of the electoral results that year: There were those vast
stretches of inland "red" space (all the networks used red to
designate Republican victories), where people voted for George W.
Bush, and those tiny little "blue" coastal areas, where people lived
in big cities and voted for Al Gore. On the face of it there was
nothing really remarkable about these red and blue blocs, especially
since in terms of the popular vote the contest was essentially a tie.

Still, many commentators divined in the 2000 map a
baleful cultural cleavage, a looming crisis over identity and values.
These pundits knew - before election night was over and just by
looking at the map - what those two Americas represented. Indeed, the
explanation was ready to go before the election even happened. The
great dream of conservatives ever since the thirties has been a
working-class movement that for once takes their side of the issues,
that votes Republican and reverses the achievements of working-class
movements of the past. In the starkly divided red/blue map of 2000
they thought they saw it being realized: The old Democratic regions of
the South and the Great Plains were on their team now, stout blocs of
uninterrupted red, while the Democrats were restricted to the
old-line, blue-blood states of the Northeast, along with the hedonist
left coast.(2)

I do not want to minimize the change that this
represents. Certain parts of the Midwest were once so reliably leftist
that the historian Walter Prescott Webb, in his 1931 history of the
region, pointed to its persistent radicalism as one of the "Mysteries
of the Great Plains." Today the mystery is only heightened: It seems
inconceivable that the Midwest was ever thought of as a "radical"
place, as anything but the land of the bland, the easy snoozing
flyover. Readers in the thirties, on the other hand, would have known
instantly what Webb was talking about, since so many of the great
political upheavals of their part of the twentieth century were
launched from the territory west of the Ohio River. The region as they
knew it was what gave the country Socialists like Eugene Debs, fiery
progressives like Robert La Follette, and practical unionists like
Walter Reuther. They might even have known that there were once
Socialist newspapers in Kansas and Socialist voters in Oklahoma and
Socialist mayors in Milwaukee, and that there were radical farmers
across the region forever enlisting in militant agrarian organizations
like the Farmers' Alliance, or the Farmer-Labor Party, or the
Non-Partisan League, or the Farm Holiday Association.

Almost all of these associations have evaporated today.
That the region's character has been altered so thoroughly - that so
much of the Midwest now regards the welfare state as an alien
imposition; that we have trouble even believing there was a time when
progressives were described with adjectives like "fiery," rather than
"snooty" or "bossy" or "wimpy'' - has to stand as one of the great
reversals in American history.

So when the electoral map of 2000 is compared with that
of 1896the year of the showdown that pitted the "great commoner,"
William Jennings Bryan, against the voice of business, William
McKinley - a remarkable inversion is indeed evident. Bryan was a
Nebraskan, a leftist, and a fundamentalist Christian, an almost
unimaginable combination today, and in 1896 he swept most of the
country outside the elite Northeast, which stood rock-solid for
industrial capitalism. George W. Bush's advisers love to compare their
man to McKinley, and armed with the map of 2000 the President's fans
are able to envisage the great contest of 1896 refought with optimal
results: the politics of McKinley chosen by the Middle American voters
for Bryan.

From this one piece of evidence, the electoral map, the
pundits simply veered off into authoritative-sounding cultural
proclamation. Just by looking at the map, they reasoned, we could
easily tell that George W. Bush was the choice of the plain people,
the grassroots Americans who inhabited the place we know as the
"heartland," a region of humility, guilelessness, and, above all,
stout yeoman righteousness. The Democrats, on the other hand, were the
party of the elite. Just by looking at the map we could see that
liberals were sophisticated, wealthy, and materialistic. While the big
cities blued themselves shamelessly, the land knew what it was about
and went Republican, by a margin in square miles of four to one.

The attraction of such a scheme for conservatives was
powerful and obvious. The Red-state narrative brought majoritarian
legitimacy to a President who had actually lost the popular vote. It
also allowed conservatives to present their views as the philosophy of
a region that Americans - even sophisticated urban ones -
traditionally venerate as the repository of national virtue, a place
of plain speaking and straight shooting. But then the idea coasted on,
becoming a standard element of the media's pop-sociology repertoire.
The "two Americas" idea became a hook for all manner of local think
pieces (Blue Minnesota is separated by only one thin street from Red
Minnesota, but my, how different those two Minnesotas are); it
provided an easy tool for contextualizing the small stories (Red
Americans love a certain stage show in Vegas, but Blue Americans
don't) or for spinning the big stories (John Walker Lindh, the
American who fought for the Taliban, was from California and therefore
a reflection of Blue-state values); and it justified countless USA
Today-style contemplations of who we Americans really are, meaning
mainly investigations of the usual - what we Americans like to drive,
to watch, to eat, and so forth.

Red America, these stories typically imply, is a
mysterious place whose thoughts and values are essentially foreign to
society's masters. Like the "Other America" of the sixties or the
"Forgotten Men" of the thirties, its vast stretches are tragically
ignored by the dominant class - that is, the people who write the
sitcoms and screenplays and the stories in glossy magazines, all of
whom, according to the conservative commentator Michael Barone, simply
"can't imagine living in such places." Which is particularly unfair of
them, impudent even, because Red America is in fact the real America,
the part of the country where reside, as a story in the Canadian
National Post put it, "the original values of America's founding."

The Gore-voting people of the Blue states, meanwhile,
were dismissed with what we will call the latte libel: the suggestion
that liberals are identifiable by their tastes and consumer
preferences and that these tastes and preferences reveal the essential
arrogance and foreignness of liberalism. And since many of the pundits
who were hailing the virtues of the Red states - pundits, remember,
who were conservatives and who supported George W. Bush - actually,
physically lived in Blue states that went for Gore, the rules of this
idiotic game allowed them to present the latte libel in the elevated
language of the confession. David Brooks, who has since made a career
out of projecting the liberal stereotype onto the map, took to the
pages of The Atlantic to admit on behalf of everyone who lives in a
Blue zone that they are all snobs, toffs, wusses, ignoramuses, and
utterly out of touch with the authentic life of the people:

We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books and
attend more plays than the people in the Red heartland. We're more
sophisticated and cosmopolitan - just ask us about our alumni trips to
China or Provence, or our interest in Buddhism. But don't ask us,
please, what life in Red America is like. We don't know. We don't know
who Tim La-Haye and Jerry B. Jenkins are.. . . We don't know what
James Dobson says on his radio program, which is listened to by
millions. We don't know about Reba and Travis . . . . Very few of us
know what goes on in Branson, Missouri, even though it has seven
million visitors a year, or could name even five NASCAR drivers.. . .
We don't know how to shoot or clean a rifle. We can't tell a military
officer's rank by looking at his insignia. We don't know what soy
beans look like when they're growing in a field.

One is tempted to dismiss Brooks's grand generalizations
by rattling off the many ways in which they're wrong: by pointing out
that the top three soybean producers - Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota -
were in fact Blue states; or by listing the many military bases
located on the coasts; or by noting that when it came time to build a
NASCAR track in Kansas, the county that won the honor was one of only
two in the state that went for Gore. Average per capita income in that
same lonely Blue county, I might as well add, is $16,000, which places
it well below Kansas and national averages, and far below what would
be required for the putting on of elitist or cosmopolitan airs of any
kind.

It's pretty much a waste of time, however, to catalogue
the contradictions(3) and tautologies(4)
and huge, honking errors(5) blowing
round in a media flurry like this. The tools being used are the blunt
instruments of propaganda, not the precise metrics of sociology. The
"two Americas" commentators showed no interest in examining the
mysterious inversion of the nation's politics in any systematic way.
Their aim was simply to bolster the stereotypes using whatever tools
were at hand: to cast the Democrats as the party of a wealthy,
pampered, arrogant elite that lives as far as it can from real
Americans; and to represent Republicanism as the faith of the
hard-working common people of the heartland, an expression of their
unpretentious, all-American ways, just like country music and NASCAR.
At this pursuit they largely succeeded. By 2003 the conservative claim
to the Midwest was so uncontested that Fox News launched a talk show
dealing in culture-war outrage that was called, simply, Heartland.

Reading through the "two Americas" literature is a
little like watching a series of Frank Capra one-reelers explaining
the principles of some turbocharged Boy Scout law:

A Red stater is humble. In fact, humility is, according
to reigning journalistic myth, the signature quality of Red America,
just as it was one of the central themes of George W. Bush's
presidential campaign. "In Red America the self is small," teaches
David Brooks. "People declare in a million ways, 'I am normal."' "Bush
Red is a simpler place," concurs John Podhoretz, a former speechwriter
for Bush the Elder, after watching people at play in Las Vegas; it's a
land "where people mourn the death of NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt,
root lustily for their teams, go to church and find comfort in
old-fashioned verities."

Here is how Missouri farmer Blake Hurst put it, proudly,
in The American Enterprise magazine:

Most Red Americans can't deconstruct
post-modem literature, give proper orders to a nanny, pick out a
cabernet with aftertones of licorice, or quote prices from the
Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. But we can raise great children, wire
our own houses, make beautiful and delicious creations with our two
hands, talk casually and comfortably about God, repair a small
engine, recognize a good maple sugar tree, tell you the histories of
our towns and the hopes of our neighbors, shoot a gun and run a
chainsaw without fear, calculate the bearing load of a roof, grow
our own asparagus..

On the Blue side of the great virtue divide, Brooks
reports, "the self is more commonly large." This species of American
can be easily identified in the field by their constant witty showing
off: They think they are so damn smart. Podhoretz (a former Republican
speechwriter, remember) admits that "we" Blue staters "cannot live
without irony," by which he means mocking everything that crosses our
path, because "we" foolishly believe that "ideological and moral
confusion are signs of a higher consciousness." Brooks, who has
elsewhere ascribed the decline of the Democratic Party to its
"snobbery," mocks Blue staters for eating at fancy restaurants and
shopping in small, pretentious stores instead of at Wal-Mart, retailer
to the real America. He actually finds a poll in which 43 percent of
liberals confess, "I like to show off," which he then tops with
another poll in which 75 percent of liberals describe themselves as
"intellectuals." Such admissions, in this company, are like calling
yourself a mind-twisting Communist.

A Red stater, meanwhile, is reverent. As we were
repeatedly reminded after the 2000 election, Red-state people have a
better relationship with God than the rest of us do. They are
"observant, tradition-minded, moralistic," in Michael Barone's
formulation. Liberals of the coasts, meanwhile, are said to be
"unobservant, liberation-minded, relativistic."

But don't worry: A Red stater is courteous, kind,
cheerful. They may be religious, but they aren't at all pushy about
it. The people David Brooks encountered in one county in Pennsylvania
declined to discuss abortion with him, from which he concludes that
"potentially controversial subjects are often played down" throughout
Red America. Even the preachers he met there are careful to respect
the views of others. These fine people "don't like public scolds."
They are easygoing believers, not interested in taking you on in a
culture war. Don't be frightened.

A Red stater is loyal. This is the part of the country
that fills the Army's ranks and defends the flag against all comers.
While the European-minded know-it-alls of Blueland waited only a short
time after 9/11 to commence blaming America for the tragedy, the story
goes, sturdy Red staters stepped forward unhesitatingly to serve their
country one more time. For Blake Hurst of Missouri, this special
relationship with the military is both a matter of pride ("Red America
is never redder than on our bloodiest battlefields") and a grievance -
you know, the usual one, the one you saw in Rambo, the one where all
the cowards of the coasts stab the men of Redland in the back during
the Vietnam War.

But above all, a Red stater is a regular, down-home
working stiff, whereas Blue staters are always some sort of
pretentious paper-shuffler. Indeed, the entire idea that the United
States is "two nations" defined by social rank was an invention of the
labor movement and the historical left. The agrarian radicals of the
1890s used the "two nations" image to distinguish between "producers"
and "parasites," or simply "the robbers and the robbed," as "Sockless"
Jerry Simpson, the leftist congressman from Kansas, liked to put it.
Today we've got all the disillusionment, all the resentment, but none
of the leftism. "Rural America is pissed," a small-town Pennsylvania
man told a reporter from Newsweek. Explaining why he and his neighbors
voted for George Bush, he said: "These people are tired of moral
decay. They're tired of everything being wonderful on Wall Street and
terrible on Main Street." Let me repeat that: They're voting
Republican in order to get even with Wall Street.

Blake Hurst, the Missouri farmer who is so proud of
being humble, points out in The American Enterprise that "the work we
[Red staters] do can be measured in bushels, pounds, shingles nailed,
and bricks laid, rather than in the fussy judgments that make up
office employee reviews." But there's something fishy about Hurst's
claim to the mantle of workerist righteousness, something beyond the
immediate fishiness of a magazine ordinarily given to assailing unions
and saluting the Dow now printing such a fervent celebration of
blue-collar life. Just being familiar with the physical world
shouldn't automatically make you a member of the beaten-down producer
class any more than does a taste for meat loaf or NASCAR. Indeed,
elsewhere Hurst describes himself not as a simple farmer but as the
co-owner of a family business overseeing the labors of a number of
employees, employees whom, he confides, he and his family "don't pay
high wages." This man may live in the sticks, but he is about as much
a blue-collar toiler as is Al Gore himself.

Perhaps that is why Hurst is so certain that although
there is obviously a work-related divide between the two Americas -
separating them into Hurst's humble, producer America and the
liberals' conceited, parasite America - it isn't the scary divide that
Sockless Simpson yelled about, the sort of divide between workers and
bosses that might cause problems for readers of The American
Enterprise. "Class-consciousness isn't a problem in Red America," he
assures them: people are "perfectly happy to be slightly overweight
[and] a little underpaid."

Class doesn't matter to the noble proletarians of Bush
country. This is a verdict repeated virtually without fail throughout
the "two Americas" literature, often only a few short sentences after
the author has finished mocking rich Blue staters for their fancy
cars, or their snob coffee, or their expensive nannies, or their
ignorance of soybeans. Barone: "The divide is not economic, but
cultural." Podhoretz: "The divide is not racial or economic." Brooks:
"People in Franklin County [his microcosm of Red America] have no
class resentment or class consciousness." A small-town newspaper
editor tells him that people hereabouts are "really into the free
market"; other "locals" are reported to stare at him blankly when, he
asks if they resent those who have done well in the New Economy; and
Brooks eventually concludes that worrying about the problems faced by
the working class is yet another deluded affectation of the Blue-state
rich.

Thinking about class in terms of a hierarchy, where some
people occupy more exalted positions than others, Brooks continues, is
"Marxist" and presumably illegitimate. The correct model, he suggests,
is a high school cafeteria, segmented into self-chosen taste-clusters
like "nerds, jocks, punks, bikers, techies, druggies, God Squadders,"
and so on. We choose where we want to sit and whom we want to mimic
and what class we want to belong to the same way we choose hairstyles
or TV shows or extracurricular activities.

As a description of the way society works this is
preposterous: Even by high school, most of us know that we won't be
able to choose our station in life the way we choose a soda pop or
even the way we choose our friends. But as a clue into the deepest
predilections of the backlash mind, Brooks's scheme is a revelation.

What divides Americans is authenticity, not something
hard and ugly like economics. While liberals commit endless acts of
hubris - consuming show-off products, driving ostentatious European
cars, and trying to reform the world - the humble people of the Red
states go about their unpretentious business, eating down-home foods,
vacationing in the Ozarks, whistling while they work, feeling
comfortable about who they are, and knowing they are secure under the
watch of George W. Bush, a man they love as one of their own.

For as long as America loves authenticity, my home state
of Kansas is going to be symbolically preeminent. Whatever the
standard for measuring salt-of-the-earthness happens to be at the
moment - the WPA social realism of the thirties or the Red-state
theories of today's conservatives - Kansas is going to rank high. It
is the exact center of the continental United States, the vortex of
the nation, in Allen Ginsberg's phrase. Kansas is deepest Reagan
Country, the heart of the heartland, the roots of the grass, the
Reddest of Red states.

Kansas is what New York City is not: a guileless,
straight-talking truth-place where people are unaffected, genuine, and
attuned to the rhythms of the universe. "I loved Kansas City!" Ann
Coulter exclaimed to an interviewer in New York.(6)
"It's like my favorite place in the world. Oh, I think it is so great
out there. Well, that's America. It's the opposite of this town.
They're Americans, they're so great, they're rooting for America. I
mean, there's so much common sense!"

Coulter is embracing a literary myth of long standing
when she enthuses this way. Like Peoria or Muncie, Kansas figures in
literature and film as a stand-in for the nation as a whole, the
distilled essence of who we are. "The Kansan," wrote John Gunther in
1947, is "the most average of all Americans, a kind of common
denominator for the entire continent." Kansas is "Midway, USA"; it's
the setting for countless Depression-era documentary photographs; it's
the home of the bright boy in the mailroom who wants to be a player on
Wall Street. It's where Dorothy wants to return. It's where Superman
grows up.

In politics, where Americans worship at the shrine of
the unaffected common man, averageness allows all Kansans to present
themselves as something of an aristocracy. Even bankers and oilmen, if
they come from Kansas, carry with them the coveted authenticity of the
real American. Thus Senator Sam Brownback, a member of one of the
wealthiest families in the state and a stalwart friend of the CEO
class, refers to himself on the floor of Congress as a "farmboy from
Parker, Kansas." Thus Bob Dole, that consummate Washington insider,
opened his 1996 presidential campaign by complaining that "our leaders
have grown too isolated from places like Topeka - embarrassed by the
values here."

But nice warm averageness has not always been the
framing myth here. A century ago the favorite stereotype of Kansas was
not as the land of normality but as the freak state. The place crawled
with religious fanatics, crackpot demagogues, and alarming hybrids of
the two, such as the murderous abolitionist John Brown, who is
generally regarded as the state's patron saint, and the rabid
prohibitionist Carry A. Nation, who expressed her distaste for liquor
by smashing saloons with a hatchet. Kansas was a violent and a radical
and maybe even a crazy place both by nature and by the circumstances
of its founding. The state was initially settled by eastern
abolitionists and Free-Soilers who came there to block Missourians
from moving westward - in other words, to contain the "slave power" by
armed force; before long the unique savagery of the border war they
fought put Kansas in headlines around the world. Dodge City and
Abilene, famed for picturesque cowboy homicides, are found there as
well, as are a good proportion of the nation's tornadoes and, in the
twentieth century, its dust storms, which obliterated farms and
carried the topsoil of the entire region off into the wild blue
yonder. Early accounts of the state even tell of settlers driven
insane by the constant howling of the wind.

The most famous freak-out of them all was Populism, one
of the first great American leftist movements. Populism tore through
other states as well - wailing all across Texas, the South, and the
West in the 1890s - but Kansas was the place that really distinguished
itself by its enthusiasm. Driven to the brink of ruin by years of bad
prices, debt, and deflation, the state's farmers came together in huge
meetings where homegrown troublemakers like Mary Elizabeth Lease
exhorted them to "raise less corn and more hell." The radicalized
farmers marched through the small towns in day-long parades, raging
against what they called the "money power." They saw their movement as
a sort of revelation, a moment when an entire generation of "Kansas
fools" figured out that they'd been lied to all their lives.

Today the two myths are one. Kansas may be the land of
averageness, but it is a freaky, militant, outraged averageness.
People in suburban Kansas City vituperate against the sinful
cosmopolitan elite of New York and Washington, D.C.; people in rural
Kansas vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of Topeka and
suburban Kansas City. Survivalist supply shops sprout in neighborhood
strip malls. People send Christmas cards urging their friends to look
on the bright side of Islamic terrorism, since the Rapture is now
clearly at hand.

Under the state's simple blue flag are gathered today
the most flamboyant assortment of cranks, conspiracists, and calamity
howlers the Republic has ever seen. The Kansas school board draws the
guffaws of the world for purging references to macro-evolution from
state science standards. Cities large and small across the state still
hold out against water fluoridation, while one tiny hamlet takes the
additional step of requiring firearms in every home. A prominent
female politician expresses public doubts about the wisdom of women's
suffrage, while another pol proposes that the state sell off the
Kansas Turnpike in order to solve its budget crisis. Impoverished
inhabitants of the state's most scenic area fight with fanatical
determination to prevent a National Park from opening up in their
neighborhood, while the Rails-to-Trails program, regarded everywhere
else in the union as a harmless scheme for family fun, is reviled in
Kansas as an infernal design on the rights of property owners.
Operation Rescue selects Wichita as the stage for its great offensive
against abortion, calling down 30,000 testifying fundamentalists on
the city, witnessing and blocking traffic and chaining themselves to
fences. A preacher from Topeka travels the nation advising Americans
to love God's holy hate, showing up wherever a gay person has been in
the news to announce that "God Hates Fags."

If this is the place where America goes looking for its
national soul, then this is where America finds that its soul, after
stewing in the primal resentment of the backlash, has gone all sour
and wrong. If Kansas is the concentrated essence of normality, then
here is where we can see the deranged gradually become normal, where
we look into that handsome, confident, reassuring, all-American face -
class president, quarterback, Rhodes scholar, bond trader, builder of
industry - and realize that we are staring into the eyes of a lunatic.

According to the backlash vision of America as it's
supposed to be, people in places like Kansas are part of one big
authentic family, basking in the easy solidarity of patriotism, hard
work, and the universal ability to identify soybeans in a field. But
of course this isn't the case. All over America, in the Red states as
well as the Blue, different communities support different industries
and experience dramatically different fates. And in Kansas, true to
its reputation as a microcosm of America, you can find each of the
basic elements of the American economic mix. In the wealthy Kansas
City suburbs of Johnson County, "creative" white-collar types develop
business strategies over lattes. In Wichita, unionized blue-collar
workers manufacture airplanes. Way out west in Garden City, low-wage
immigrant workers kill cows. And in between, farmers struggle to make
a living on the most fertile and productive land in the world.

In 2003, just as the affaires Enron and WorldCom were
enlightening the nation about the mischief made by its CEO class, so
three similar corporate disasters, on a smaller scale, were teaching
Kansans the same lessons about their own, homegrown elites - and,
incidentally, about the true nature of the economic climate that
conservatism has created. Each of the three cases, like the larger
scandals of Enron and WorldCom involved a quasi-public utility whose
leadership had taken long pulls from the bubbling bong of New Economy
theory. At each one the bosses, always heralded as geniuses, had
invented elaborate plans for freeing themselves from the humdrum of
public service and setting out to mulct the world - and in each case
these plans collapsed for all the usual, predictable reasons, while
workers and customers screamed and mom and pop shareholders discovered
they weren't going to retire in Hawaii after all.

In the windblown city of Topeka, the tale concerns the
state's largest power company, an outfit that once bore the humble
name Western Resources. Humility, though, was not to be Western's
destiny. When this outfit looked in the mirror, it saw a player. So
after almost a century spent playing the boring, regulated utility
game, in the mid-nineties Western brought to Topeka one David Wittig,
a flashy mergers-and-acquisitions man from Salomon Brothers, the Wall
Street brokerage house, and set out to do some merging and acquiring,
preferably in fields not subject to state regulation. The company even
proposed a deal at one point in which the debt piled up in all these
corporate adventures would stay with the plodding public utility back
in Topeka, where those plodding Kansas ratepayers could pay it off,
while Wittig himself would run the sexy unregulated acquisitions. You
know the routine: Socialize the risk, privatize the profits. Along the
road to this moment of enlightenment the organization picked up a
"chief strategic officer," a stable of company jets, and a new name:
Westar.

Westar never quite made it to player status: Its
acquisitions turned out to be ill advised, and shares in the company,
which are widely held in Kansas, fell 73 percent from their 1998
highs. Wittig himself, however, became Topeka's player in chief. He
continued to pull down millions of dollars in compensation even while
the company's share price plummeted and employees were laid off to
reduce costs. Wittig routinely flew to Europe and the Hamptons on
company jets; he spent $6.5 million decorating the company's executive
suite to plans drawn up by Marc Charbonnet, a celebrated New York
interior designer; he even bought the old mansion of hometown hero Alf
Landon and had it conspicuously renovated by this same Charbonnet.
When Wittig finally left the company in 2002, thanks to an
embarrassing but unrelated money-laundering charge, local headlines
screamed that he might walk away with some $42.5 million more in
cumulative compensation.

Just across the state line in Missouri, a similar story
was unfolding. This one involved a power company whose original,
unassuming name had been Missouri Public Service, which it had
upgraded to UtiliCorp, and then, breaking the surly bonds of meaning
altogether, to Aquila. The idea of public service was jettisoned too,
as Aquila prepared for the great competitive utopia to come by
acquiring utilities around the country and overseas, and by setting up
a freewheeling energy-trading operation through which it sought to
replicate the spectacular success then being enjoyed by Enron, that
idol of the management gurus. At Aquila the resident geniuses were
brothers Robert and Richard Green, who took turns sitting in the
chair. And then came the familiar stages of disaster: the bonds
downgraded to junk, the massive layoffs, the share price plummeting 96
percent, and the public revelation that Richard Green had pulled down
$21.6 million during the years of the collapse while Robert took home
$19 million, plus an additional $7.6 million severance package when he
walked away from the wreckage. Let the regulators clean it up.

Then there is Sprint, the familiar provider of
cell-phone and long-distance service, which started life as a
small-town Kansas phone company called United Telecommunications. The
free-market revolution of the nineties ballooned this sleepy local
outfit into a telecom superpower, a titan in the most fabled New
Economic field of them all. By 1999, Sprint was the largest employer
in the Kansas City area and was building a colossal corporate campus
in the Johnson County suburb of Overland Park that would incorporate
3.9 million square feet of office space, 16 parking garages, and its
own zip code. This was typical of the industry. In the world of the
telecoms, everything was bigger. The sums pocketed by those on the
winning side of this great capitalist awakening were beyond
comprehension, while the rhetoric buoying them up was otherworldly,
awestruck, utopian - remember? The abolition of distance. The
"visionary" CEOs. The "telecosm." Unfortunately, all that money and
all that idolatry encouraged what now seems to have been a staggering
amount of fraud and overconstruction.

On a different level stood Sprint. Here the master of
the whirl was William T. Esrey, a Kansas City native beloved by
business journalists. Esrey's greatest moment was also the climax of
the telecom bubble - the proposed 1999 merger with WorldCom that, at
$129 billion, would have been the largest of all time and would
naturally have required Sprint to move to Worldcom's hometown. The
national media turned somersaults saluting Esrey for engineering the
triumph. What he really engineered, though, was a prominent place in
the rogues' gallery of personal financial gluttony. As a condition of
the deal, he and his top lieutenants were granted stupendous helpings
of stock options - $311 million worth between Esrey and Ronald LeMay,
his right-hand man - whether regulators allowed the merger to go
through or not.

Kansas Citians were stunned. Not so much by the stock
options as by the prospect of the city's largest employer packing up
and disappearing. The blow was especially inconceivable in the smiling
suburb of Overland Park, where the corporate way is almost a religion
and where Sprint's massive "campus" was nearing completion. Were these
the wages of "leadership," of "excellence," of deregulation? Would the
suburb's southern reaches; which had been redesigned to please the
telecom giant, now become a New Economy ghost town? Who would fill
those parking garages, bid up the value of those gated communities,
play on all those designer golf courses?

As we all know, federal regulators nixed the deal,
saving Overland Park's Republican ass. Esrey and his posse still got
their paper millions, as per their plan. But between late 1999 and the
summer of 2002, Sprint shareholders saw the value of their holdings
shrivel by 90 percent as the telecom rapture gave way to reality. By
the beginning of 2003, Sprint had laid off more than 17,000 workers.
WorldCom, meanwhile, confessed to accounting fraud on a scale
previously unknown and then went bankrupt. The final act came in
February 2003, when the tax shelters in which Esrey and LeMay had
stashed their loot were called into question by the IRS. The two, it
was revealed, had never sold the shares they received back in 1999,
and now they were liable for a bubble-era tax bill in a distinctly
austere time. Sprint responded to their plight by firing them.

At the time of their corporate stardom, Bill Esrey of
Sprint and Bob Green of Aquila both lived in Mission Hills, Kansas, a
small suburb of Kansas City. David Wittig, for his part, grew up in
the next suburb to the south, while Ronald LeMay lived a few blocks to
the east.

Out-of-town papers typically refer to the Kansas City
"business community" as "close-knit." David Brooks might say that
Kansas City's business owners are just folks who like to sit together
in life's cafeteria at what happens to be a very small, very
well-stocked table. The correct term for them, however, is "elite."
Mission Hills is a graphic illustration of what elites are about. Its
two square miles of rolling, landscaped exquisiteness house a
population of about 3,600 with a median annual household income of
$188,821, making it by far the richest town in Kansas and, indeed, one
of the richest in the country. But to call it a "town," although
technically correct, is misleading. Mission Hills has three country
clubs and a church but no businesses of any kind. Its population is
about the same as that of the two blocks surrounding my apartment in
Chicago. It doesn't have buses, commuter trains, or even proper
sidewalks, in most places. What it has are mansions, modern and
colonial, whimsical and sober, ensconced in vast, carefully maintained
lawns that roll tastefully over the hills to the horizon.

When my family moved to Mission Hills at the tail end of
the bull market of the sixties, it was a suburb where doctors and
lawyers rubbed elbows with CEOs; where one found Pontiacs and ride-on
lawn mowers and driveway basketball courts and even the occasional
ranch house with an asphalt roof. There were also, of course, the
original inhabitants whose grand old houses were now overgrown with
vines and invisible from the street thanks to shrubbery and weeds that
had been neglected for years. In their picturesque decay these dark
palaces became a source of morbid fascination to my brothers and me in
the troubled seventies: Even as children we knew these houses were
relics of a dead past, a time when people had servants and gardeners
and hand-built cars.

Nobody mows his own lawn in Mission Hills anymore. Every
time I paid a visit during the nineties, it seemed another of the more
modest houses in our neighborhood had been tom down and replaced by a
much larger edifice, a three-story stone chateau, say, bristling with
turrets and porches and dormers and gazebos and a three-car garage.
The dark old palaces from the twenties sprouted spiffy new slate
roofs, immaculately tailored gardens, remote-controlled driveway
gates, and sometimes entire new wings.

These changes are of course not unique to Mission Hills.
What has gone on there is normal in its freakishness. You can observe
the same changes in Shaker Heights, or La Jolla, or Winnetka, or Ann
Coulter's hometown of New Canaan, Connecticut. They reflect the
simplest and hardest of economic realities. The fortunes of Mission
Hills rise and fall in inverse relation to the fortunes of ordinary
working people. When workers are powerful, taxes are high, and labor
is expensive (as was the case from World War II until the late
seventies), the houses built here are smaller, the cars domestic, the
servants rare, and the overgrown look fashionable in gardening
circles. People read novels about eccentric English aristocrats
trapped in a democratic age, sighing sadly for their lost world.

When workers are weak, taxes are down, and labor is
cheap (as in the twenties and again today), Mission Hills coats itself
in shimmering raiments of gold and green. Now the stock returns are
plush, the bonus packages fat, the servants affordable, and the suburb
finds that the baronial life isn't dead after all. It builds new
additions and new fountains and new Italianate porches overlooking
Olympian flower gardens maintained by shifts of laborers. People read
books about the glory of empire. The kids get Porsches or SUVs when
they turn sixteen; the houses with asphalt roofs discreetly disappear;
the wings that were closed off are triumphantly reopened, and all is
restored to its former grandeur.

Growing up in Mission Hills you quickly learn the
boundaries and customs of the local notables: the local prep school
attended by all the CEOs' kids, the snob colleges they all plan to
attend in a few years, the family businesses they stand to inherit,
the private police forces they maintain. You also learn that many of
your rich friends' dads are in prison. Epidemic white-collar crime is
the silent partner of the suburb's contentment, the ugly companion of
its tranquil domesticity and the earnest flattery of its courtiers. In
addition to disgraced CEOs like Esrey and Green, Mission Hills is the
home of numerous smaller-scale thieves, embezzlers, tax evaders,
real-estate frauds, and check forgers. The prominence of the criminal
element here is likely related to Kansas's unlimited homestead
exemption, which allows those declaring bankruptcy to keep their
residence. Naturally people preparing to go under wanted the priciest
house available, and thus Mission Hills became a magnet for the
legally challenged from all across the region. That, plus the
borderline criminality of capitalism itself, a condition that has
rudely impressed itself on much of the world in the last few years.

When I was in high school, our neighbors worked,
shopped, and viced in Kansas City, Missouri; today they all drive in
the other direction. By the end of the nineties the metropolitan
area's center of gravity had shifted to the most peripheral point of
the Kansas suburbs. The largest of the suburbs, the aforementioned
Overland Park, began to dream of rivaling Kansas City itself. It built
hotels and a convention center, hoping to siphon even more sustenance
away from the gasping metropolis; it slapped up shopping malls; it
constructed a new office district, complete with runty glass
mini-skyscrapers at the southernmost point of settlement; and it
platted out subdivisions without end - a raw, wood-shingled
fortification stretching over the hills as far as the eye could see.
And, as noted, it convinced Sprint to choose this locale for its
sixteen-parking-garage "campus."

Today, Johnson County is a vast suburban empire, a
happy, humming confusion of freeways and malls and nonstop
construction; of identical cul-de-sacs and pretentious European street
names and overachieving school districts and oversized houses
constructed to one of four designs. By all the standards of
contemporary American business civilization, it is a great success
story. It is the wealthiest county in Kansas by a considerable margin,
and the free-market rapture of the New Economy nineties served it
well, scandals notwithstanding. Telecom and corporate management were
the right businesses to be in, and Johnson County's population grew by
almost 100,000 over the course of the decade: an unflagging stream of
middle-class humanity to fill its office parks and to absorb the
manufactured bonhomie of its Applebee's and the gourmet pretensions of
its Dean & DeLucas. Johnson County is also one of the most intensely
Republican places in the nation. Registered Republicans outnumber
Democrats by more than two to one. Of Johnson County's twenty-two
representatives in the Kansas House of Representatives, only one is a
Democrat.

The only other part of Kansas that had a winning formula
for the New Economy years was at the other end of the state, the area
around Garden City, a remote town on the treeless western plains.
There are no Dean & DeLucas in Garden City. This is cattle country,
the other end of the food chain. The other end of the world.

They call places like Garden City "rural boom-towns."
When you're there you keep coming across the slogan "Just Plain
Success." And from a statistical angle its accomplishments do look
impressive. Thanks to Garden City and the nearby towns of Liberal and
Dodge City, Kansas was the biggest beef-packing state in the country
through most of the last decade. Today those three towns in
far-western Kansas have a "daily slaughter capacity" of some 24,000
cattle, and they produce fully 20 percent of the beef consumed in the
United States. I am a great eater of beef, and so I suppose this is
something to be proud of.

But it is profoundly misleading to describe these things
in this old-fashioned way - as though Garden City were "cow butcher to
the world," some miniature Chicago resourceful Kansans have hewn out
of the barren prairie. These are things that have been done to Kansas
and Garden City, and to remote towns all across the Great Plains. The
only actors with real power are the companies that build the
slaughterhouses: Tyson (known universally by its former name, IBP, for
"Iowa Beef Packers"), the unmelodious ConAgra (known universally by
its former name, Monfort), and the even less melodious Cargill Meat
Solutions (known universally by its former name, Excel). And these
entities, in turn, claim that their every move is dictated by the
remorseless demands of the market. There are ranchers aplenty but few
rugged individualists out here anymore. Today Garden and Dodge City
are caught on the steel hooks of economic logic as surely and as
haplessly as are the cows they hack so industriously apart.

The single most important element of that logic is, as
always, the demand for cheap labor. From that simple imperative
springs nearly every thing that has happened here over the last
twenty-five years. Beginning in the sixties the big thinkers of the
meat biz figured out ways to routinize and de-skill their operations
from beginning to end. Not only would this allow them to undercut the
skilled, unionized butchers who were then employed by grocery stores
but it would also let them move their plants to the remotest part of
the Great Plains, where they could ditch their unionized big-city
workers and save on rent. By the early nineties this strategy had put
the century-old stockyards in Chicago and Kansas City out of business
altogether. Like every other profit-maximizing entity, the industry's
ultimate preference would probably be to have done with this expensive
country once and for all and relocate operations to the Third World,
where they could be free from regulators, trial lawyers, and prying
journalists. Sadly, for them, they are prevented from achieving that
dream by various food regulations. So instead they bring the Third
World here, employing waves of immigrants from Southeast Asia, Mexico,
and points south.

The area around Garden City is a showplace of
industrialized agriculture: vast farms raise nothing but feed corn
despite the semi-arid climate; gigantic rolling irrigation devices
pump water from an aquifer and make this otherwise unthinkable crop
possible; feedlots the size of cities transform the corn into cow
flesh; and windowless concrete slaughterhouses squat silently on the
outskirts of town, harvesting the final product. Take a drive through
the countryside here and you will see no trees, no picturesque old
windmills or bridges or farm buildings, and almost no people. When the
aquifer dries up, as it someday will - its millions of years of
collected rainwater spent in just a few decades - you will see even
less out here.

One thing you do see, on the outskirts of town, are the
trailer-park cities, dilapidated and unpaved and rubbish-strewn, that
house a large part of Garden City's workforce. Confronted with some of
the most advanced union-avoidance strategies ever conceived by the
mind of business man, these people receive mediocre wages for doing
what is statistically the most dangerous work in industrial America.
Thanks to the rapid turnover at the slaughterhouses, few of them
receive health or retirement benefits. The "social costs" of
supporting them - education, health care, law enforcement - are
"externalized," as the scholarly types put it, pushed off onto the
towns themselves, or onto church groups and welfare agencies, or onto
the countries from which the workers come. With constant speedup of
the line and with the cold temperatures of the plant, one angry worker
told me, "After ten years, people walk like they're sixty or seventy
years old."

This is economic growth, yes, but it is a species of
growth that makes a city less wealthy and less healthy as its
population increases. Viewed from Mission Hills, it is a social order
that delivers quaint slate roofs, copper gutters, and gurgling
fountains in tasteful traffic islands; viewed from Garden City, it is
an order that brings injury and infection and death by a hundred forms
of degradation: rusting playgrounds for the kids, shabby decaying
schools, a lifetime of productiveness gone in a few decades, and
depleted groundwater, too. The good people of Mission Hills remain
unfazed by all this. They may be too polite to say it aloud, but they
know that poverty rocks. Poverty is profitable. Poverty makes stocks
go up and labor come down.

I have heard people justify what goes on in Garden City
by reasoning that, well, it's better than what's gone on everywhere
else in rural Kansas. It's better than having no economy at all.

Walk down the main street of just about any farm town in
the state and you know immediately what they're talking about. This is
a civilization in the early stages of irreversible decay. Main Streets
here are vacant, almost as a rule; their grandiose stone facades are
crumbling and covered up with plywood - rotting plywood, usually,
itself simply hung and abandoned fifteen years ago or whenever it was
that Wal-Mart came to town.

More than two thirds of Kansas counties lost population
between 1980 and 2000, some by as much as 25 percent. I am told that
there are entire towns in the western part of the state getting by on
Social Security: No one is left there but the aged. There are no
doctors, no shoe stores. Kansas dwindles in significance with each
passing decade as its congressional delegation and electoral vote are
steadily whittled away.

The town where this feeling of dissipation struck me
most powerfully was Emporia, a place once famous as the home of the
author and newspaperman William Allen White. In our grandparents' day,
White was a nationally known figure, a confidant of presidents, a
winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and the unofficial spokesman of
small-town America. White's signature literary offering, at least in
his early days, was the droll vignette of village life; portraits of a
Middle America that was easygoing and contented, industrious, tidy,
crime-free, and wise in its humility. All that it demanded of the
world was a chance to work hard, play fair, and show 'em what we were
made of here in the heartland.

Here is what I saw in the two hours that I wandered
around Emporia on an October day some ninety-eight years after William
Allen White published In Our Town: houses made of painted
particleboard; a facade on Commercial Street composed of untreated
two-by-fours, nailed one next to the other; imposing brick homes with
every window frame empty and grass three feet high in the yard;
tumbledown apartment buildings with sprayed-on stucco and peeling
veneer; bungalows with porches in mid-collapse and flimsy plastic wrap
instead of glass; prefabricated steel utility buildings interspersed
with residences; stone-slab sidewalks grown so craggy and broken they
can't be used; a rain gutter jutting from a house like a bone from a
broken arm; an air conditioner abandoned in the middle of a weedy
lawn. And wafting faintly above it all, as if from the PA system at
some nearby public swimming pool, the eternal classic rock of the
1970s: Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Rush.

There's a reason you probably haven't heard much about
this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can't be easily
blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or
high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state
wasn't the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the
poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the
conservatives' beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its
most unrestrained, has little use for small-town merchants or the
agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place.
Deregulated capitalism is what has allowed Wal-Marts to crush local
businesses across the Midwest and, even more importantly, what has
driven agriculture, the region's raison d'etre, to a state of
near-collapse.

People who have never lived in a farm state often think
of all agricultural interests as essentially identical: farmers and
huge agribusiness conglomerates want the same things, they believe.
But in reality the interests of the two are more like those of the
chicken and Colonel Sanders of backlash lore. And Colonel Sanders has
been on an unbroken winning streak now for twenty-some years, with
farm legislation, trade policy, and a regulatory climate all crafted
to strengthen the conglomerates while weakening farmers. For
shareholders and upper management of companies like Archer Daniels
Midland and Tyson the result has been miraculous; for towns like
Emporia it has been ruinous.

Whereas farmers are naturally disorganized, agribusiness
seeks always to merge and acquire and choke off competition. And so,
like other industries, it was finally permitted to do these things in
the deregulatory climate of the Reagan-Clinton era. In the eighties,
according to William Heffernan, a sociologist at the University of
Missouri, agriculture experts generally agreed that if four companies
controlled more than 40 percent of market share in a given field, it
was no longer competitive. Today, Heffernan estimates, the four
largest players process 81 percent of the beef, 59 percent of the
pork, and 50 percent of the chicken produced in the United States. The
same phenomenon is at work in grain: The largest four process 61
percent of American wheat, 80 percent of American soybeans, and either
57 percent or 74 percent of American corn, depending on the method. It
is no coincidence that the internal motto of Archer Daniels Midland,
the grain-processing giant notorious for its political clout and its
price-fixing, is reported to be, "The competitor is our friend and the
customer is our enemy."

The admirers of farm deregulation - and there are plenty
of them, in economics departments as well as in the Bush
Administration Department of Agriculture - see in it not some hideous
power grab but a heroic "restructuring" of the food industry. Cargill,
ADM, and the rest of the giants are bringing order out of chaos; if we
finally have to say goodbye to the Jeffersonian fantasy of the family
farm - if we have to transform the prosperous farmer into a
sharecropper and turn the countryside into an industrialized wasteland
and destroy the small towns - maybe it's all for the best.

One thing unites all these different groups of Kansans,
these millionaires and trailer-park dwellers, these farmers and
thrift-store managers and slaughterhouse workers and utility
executives: they are almost all Republicans. Meatpacking Garden City
voted for George W. Bush in even greater numbers than did affluent
Johnson County.

Not too long ago, Kansans would have responded to the
current situation by making the bastards pay. This would have been a
political certainty, as predictable as what happens when you touch a
match to a puddle of gasoline. When business screwed the farmers and
the workers - when it implemented monopoly strategies invasive beyond
the Populists' worst imaginings, when it ripped off shareholders and
casually tossed thousands out of work - you could be damned sure about
what would follow.

Not these days. Out here the gravity of discontent pulls
in only one direction: to the right, to the right, further to the
right. Strip today's Kansans of their job security and they head out
to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land and the
next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics.
Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO and there's a
good chance they'll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about
the remedies their ancestors proposed - unions, antitrust laws, public
ownership - and you might as well be referring to the days when
knighthood was in flower.

Let us pause for a moment and gaze across this landscape
of dysfunction. A state is spectacularly ill served by the Reagan-Bush
stampede of deregulation, privatization, and laissez-faire. It sees
its countryside depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its cities
stagnate - and its wealthy enclaves sparkle, behind their
remote-controlled security gates. The state erupts in revolt, making
headlines around the world with its bold defiance of convention. But
what do its revolutionaries demand? More of the very measures that
have brought ruination on them and their neighbors in the first place.

This is not just the mystery of Kansas; this is the
mystery of America, the historical shift that has made it all
possible.

In Kansas the shift is more staggering than elsewhere,
simply because it has been so decisive, so extreme. The people who
were once radical are now reactionary. Although they speak today in
the same aggrieved language of victimization, and although they face
the same array of economic forces as their hard-bitten ancestors,
today's rebels make demands that are precisely the opposite. Tear down
the federal farm programs, they cry. Privatize the utilities. Repeal
the progressive taxes. All that Kansas asks today is a little help
nailing itself to that cross of gold.

1) I am referring to Loup County,
Nebraska. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the county's
per capita personal income was only $6,235 in 2002. In 2000, the
poorest county was McPherson, also in Nebraska, which went for George
W. Bush by more than 80 percent. On the sad phenomenon of High Plains
poverty, see the study by Patricia Funk and Jon Bailey, "Trampled
Dreams: The Neglected Economy of the Rural Great Plains"
(Walthill, Nebr.: Center for Rural Affairs, 2000).
(back to text)

2)
The handful of midwestern states that also went Democratic did not fit
easily into the scheme, and so were rarely taken into account by
commentators. (back to text)

3) Consider what we might call
the snowmobile dilemma. David Brooks insists that one can trace the
Red-state/Blue-state divide by determining whether a person does
outdoor activities with motors (the good old American way) or without
(the pretentious Blue-state Way): "We [Blue-state people]
cross-country ski; they snowmobile. And yet in Newsweek's take
on the Blue/Red divide (it appeared in the issue for January 1,2001),
a "town elder" from Red America can be found railing against people
who drive snowmobiles precisely because they signal big-city contempt
for the "small-town values" of Bush Country! (back
to text)

4)
In the selection printed above, David Brooks tosses off a few names
from the conservative political world as though they were
uncontroversial folk heroes out in the hinterland, akin to
country-music stars or favorite cartoonists. But the real reason
liberals don't know much about James Dobson or Tim LaHaye is not
because they are out of touch with America but because both of these
men are ideologues of the right. Those who listen to Dobson's radio
program or buy LaHaye's novels, suffused as they are with
Bircher-style conspiracy theory, tend to be people who agree with
them, people who voted for Bush in 2000. (back to
text)

5) The central, basic assertion
of the Blue-state/Red-state literature is that the Democrats are the
party of the elite while the Republicans are the party of average,
unpretentious Americans. Accordingly. David Brooks asserts in his
Atlantic essay that "upscale areas everywhere" voted for Gore in 2000.
As a blanket statement about the rich, this is not even close to
correct. Bush was in fact the hands-down choice of ate America:
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bush raised more in
donations than Gore in each of ten industrial sectors; the only sector
in which Gore came out ahead was "labor." In fact, Bush raised more
money from wealthy contributors than any other candidate in history, a
record he then broke in 2003. Nor is Brooks' statement valid even
within its limited parameters. When he says "upscale areas everywhere
voted for Gore, he gives Chicago's North Shore as an example of what
he means. And yet, when you look up the actual 2000 voting returns for
those areas of the North Shore known for being "upscale," you find
that reality looks very different from the stereotype. Lake Forest,
the definitive and the richest North Shore burb, chose the Republican,
as it almost always does, by a whopping 70 percent. Winnetka and
Kenilworth, the other North Shore suburbs known for their upscaliness,
went for Bush by 59 percent and 64 percent, respectively. And there
were obviously many other "upscale areas" where Bush prevailed
handily: Fairfax Count Virginia (suburban D.C.), Cobb County, Georgia
(suburban Atlanta), DuPage County, Illinois (more of suburban Chicago)
, St Charles County, Missouri (suburban St Louis), and Oran County,
California (the veritable symbol of upscale suburbia, to name but a
few. (back to text)

6)
Kansas City proper is in Missouri, but its metropolitan area sprawls
across the state line, incorporating the much smaller Kansas City,
Kansas, and the affluent suburbs of Johnson County, Kansas. Today
about a third of the metro area's population resides in Kansas.
(back to text)

*
Thomas Frank is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. He is
writing a book on this topic, What's the Matter with Kansas?
which will be published by Metropolitan Books in June.

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